Skip to main content

The Night Manager, season 2 - What?

 I, for some reason, watched The Night Manager, a series from about nine years ago. I think I was going through a John LeCarre phase. Anyway, I got hooked on this spy story (as I am on Slow Horses but will probably pry myself off of it). The plot is too complicated, but let's just say a British veteran, working the night shift in a Cairo motel, gets recruited to work for British Intelligence to bring down an arms dealer who covers his work with the patina of a peace-loving NGO. He's vile and mean and ready to destroy nations for a buck. Very plot-driven but the main character is charming and you root for him. (route?)

So, when the second season finally came around, I'm watching. And I'm disappointed. The same villain is back at it. Come on, did Hugh Laurie need something to do? I guess so. He was too trusting in the first series. Second disappointment, spoiler; the antagonist, a Colombian with his own charity, is the son of the the first one. Too cute, too easy, but it did give the antagonist a motivation. The second season dealt more with corruption in the Intelligence Service, so that part was cool. Lots of twists. But you are really hoping for the son to get out from the evil father's clutches (the father is just using him, anyway; he was a love child with a Mexican woman) and for the the evil father to finally be plugged like he's plugging everyone else, even his three beautiful dogs. But no! All the good guys are dead and the charming protagonist is shot and looks like he's on his way out. No resolution! Third disappointment. We have to watch the next season, sometime in the indeterminate future, to get to the end. 

Sheesh. Will I watch it? Do I feel used and deceived? 

Probably, and yes. And it was a lot of fun, although there seemed to be some kind of lovey-dovey thing going on between the protagonist and antagonist, which was odd. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why to Read Fiction, Idea #27: Empathy, anyone?

The Idea #27 is tongue in cheek.  But these are some ideas about writing fiction, which I have done in ten novels (and counting), a dozen short stories, and two produced plays (I know, not exactly the same).  Background: In 2015 a colleague and I wrote an open educational resource public speaking textbook for a grant provided by our University System. We didn't realize at the time that it would go viral and be used all over the world within a few years. There are two reasons for that: it is good (as good as anything on the market) and it is free, although only in digital form. Check out www.exploringpublicspeaking.com for it. We also didn't know at the time that my co-author would die at 39 in 2016. I still miss him. Back to the point, I receive requests for the test banks every other day, and this morning I received one from Pennsylvania. The writer had a signature line: "Reading fiction is important. It is a vital means of imagining a life other than our own, which in t...

Books I Have Read Lately

 Retirement means more time to read.  One Blood , by Denene Millner. This book and author won the Townsend Prize for Fiction 2025 and therefore beat me as one of the other nine finalists. She deserved it for her dramatic and exotic style; mine feels pale in comparison. I have to admit, I have timed out on it when I got to the third main character's story. It starts with a Black midwife in 1950s/1960s Virginia, who is imprisoned for not lying on a birth certificate about a "white" baby's racial identity. The baby is clearly part Black, meaning either the family had Black ancestors or the mother had a lover (I'm not entirely sure about that). The midwife's daughter is brutally murdered by her lover and in this chaos, the granddaughter is spirited away to New York in a wooden box. (Why I am not sure--New York makes sense, because a relation lives there, but why she couldn't just be put on a train, I'm not sure. I imagine Black people could ride trains in ...

Keeping Up Appearances? David's Surprise Anointing to Be King

  Have you ever watched the show, Keeping Up Appearances? What it is. A comedy about a British woman who wants to be thought of as very high class even though her family is low class. Her name is Hyacinth Bucket but she pronounces it Bouquet. She wants everything perfect but her family works against her, and her neighbors run from her. We all know someone who wants to keep up appearances, and sometimes we do. In our everyday life, we depend on our eyes and we automatically trust them, at least at first, and we often don’t look closely or below the surface. Like puzzles. But we know that appearances can be deceiving, even though they catch us. So I wanted to show this video I saw recently because it’s disturbing but informative. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FERa1AI2EK8 AI has gotten far better on making these deep fakes—videos that are not of anyone but totally generated by the software. Even though they look like someone, they are not. Of course, it is stealing fro...